We reckon this is the longest and most comprehensive study ever undertaken into the comparative performance of key Olympics sponsors in activating their sponsorships through social media and networks. It used our PRINT™ performance measurement system to provide a purely quantitative assessment of sponsor brands’ performance on websites, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube over nearly 5 months from 18 April, 100 days before the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics, to the end of the Paralympics on 9 August.

Key Findings

You can download the full report here, but below is a quick visualisation of the change in rankings from 16 July to 9 September (click to enlarge)…

…and a few highlights:

Some brands (e.g. BMW, Cadbury, Cisco and P&G) benefitted from starting early while others (like adidas, British Airways, Coca-Cola, EDF and VISA) concentrated their efforts later on when Olympics fever was at a peak.

By contrast, a significant number of brands did not appear to engage with social media at all – or only sporadically.

For some, it appeared that social media activation was undertaken in isolation or as an afterthought – or as merely an amplifier for advertising campaigns.

Few campaigns seemed to be centred in ‘social’ or had social fully integrated.

Some smaller brands outperformed larger ones on the Sociagility PRINT™ rankings by adopting what appeared to be a more proactive policy of engaging in real social dialogue.

Ambush strategies by non-sponsors did not appear to generate impact in social media sufficient to compete with sponsors.

The brands that led the Sociagility PRINT™ rankings were those that used social media to focus on engagement not just brand awareness.

Results available as Open Data

After tracking 25 brands for 145 days across 4 social networks and 5 dimensions of social media performance, we’ve amassed 43,500 individual data points. In the spirit of Open Data, we are making the data from this study available for anyone to use, reuse and redistribute, subject only to a requirement to attribute and share-alike.

No doubt there will be lots of qualitative and anecdotal studies of this year’s Games but we’ve tried to make useful quantitative contribution towards planning for the next Games and towards a more rigorous approach to planning the social media aspect of sponsorship activation.